Chapter Five
Ecuador Missions
More than fifty medical brigades across the Andean Cordillera, the Amazon territory and the Ecuadorian coast — beginning, in this telling, with the night the earth moved beneath Manabí.
A Lifetime of Brigades
Home Is Where the Work Began
Long before Africa, there was Ecuador. Since 1998, as Medical Missions Chief for Fundación Niños Sanos, and from 2002 to 2009 coordinating more than fifty missions for the Orden de Malta, Dr. Quiñones has carried medicine into the isolated reaches of his own country — the Andean villages, the Amazon communities, the coast.
This chapter will grow to hold all of it. It begins with 2016, the year an earthquake split the Manabí coastline open, and the response that followed.
The Earthquake
On the night of April 16, 2016, a powerful earthquake struck Ecuador's Pacific coast, devastating towns across Manabí and Esmeraldas. Homes collapsed, hotels and clinics were left in ruins, and entire fishing communities — among them Playa Prieta — were suddenly without shelter, medicine, or care.
Dr. Quiñones organized a mission to the region later that year, bringing doctors, nurses and a brigade of young volunteers to deliver medical care and help rebuild homes for families who had lost everything.
The Aftermath
What the Earthquake Left Behind
A family home in Manabí, its frame collapsed into the grass — one of thousands of structures lost along the coast that April.
A Tent Becomes a Clinic
Working alongside UNICEF, the mission set up a field medical tent in Playa Prieta — a single canvas structure that, for the families who came through it, became the only clinic for miles. Dr. Quiñones treated patients there alongside his son, Victor Quiñones, who joined the mission in scrubs and stethoscope of his own.
Dr. Quiñones & Victor
The Field Clinic
Raising Homes from Cane and Wood
Medicine was only half the mission. The brigade — a group of young volunteers wearing the colors of the Ecuadorian flag — spent their days helping construct new bamboo-and-cane homes for displaced families, working alongside local carpenters under the coastal sun.
The mission was made possible in significant part through the support of Rulon International, a major donor to this and many of the missions that followed.
A New Home
Children at the Window of the House Their Family Lost
Built from cane and corrugated tin, raised by hand by a brigade of volunteers and the family it belonged to.
Gracias, Rulon
A Family, A Porch, A Roof Again
The volunteers' shirts say it plainly: thanks to Rulon International, for making this house — and this mission — possible.
The Ones Who Carried It Out
It took a team — young volunteers who gave their time to build, to carry, to comfort, and a local community of religious sisters who hosted and guided the mission's work in Manabí.
The Brigade
The Community
This is one mission, of more than fifty. There are many more to tell.
Still to Come
More Missions, More Stories
This chapter will grow as more photographs and stories are added — each mission finding its place here, the way Playa Prieta has.